JIGOKU APP

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: NOISE
ARE YOU AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD?: Yes, sir.
CONTACT: DatAss, PM this journal, or datNOISE#6039 on Disco.
CHARACTERS PLAYED: We're all new to this bar.

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Shinobu Jacobs
CANON: No More Heroes
CANON REFERENCE: Shinobu-specific canon through Travis Strikes Again (which takes place between NMH2 and 3). As the wiki page for Shinobu cuts off the events of NMH3, here's the page for that game (even if through most of the game, she was in a coma).
CRAU HISTORY: Nope, she's gonna be fresh out of canon!
CANON POINT: End-game of No More Heroes 3
AGE: 30, as of NMH3.
APPEARANCE: In game screenshot from NMH3. As of the events of NMH3, both of her arms have been torn off and thus replaced with robotic prosthetics. Even with wearing high heels and crazy hair, is notably shorter than every character in the game.
CONTRACT PAYMENT: $$$ for her child dojo students to make sure all their needs are being taken care of.

QUESTIONNAIRE:

How important is loyalty to you? What does it take to earn your loyalty? What extents are you willing to go through to maintain loyalty, and respect the loyalty others might have invested in you?

As Shinobu is both a practitioner and teacher of bushido, loyalty is very important to her, as it's one of the core principles of the code of contact. This is demonstrated to a high degree within her canon as once she's defeated in battle by Travis, her loyalty to him as a self-professed pupil to him from that point on is unwavering, even if Travis himself is super dismissive about it, until finally accepting the role as her master in No More Heroes 3.

As far as what it takes to earn her loyalty, she goes from wanting to kill Travis (for thinking that he was the one that killed her father) before her rankings match with him, to completely turning it around after he defeats her, but forgoes the tradition of killing her (as she was only 18 years old, and a high school student, at the time) and instead disables her by slicing off her dominant sword arm to cease her aggression, and thus spare her life. Though she still seems pissed off about it at the end of the battle, her loyalty is shown as she shows up at the end of the game to save him from being killed by his own sister. Though it could just be explained as paying back a favor for sparing her life, she's very explicit in stating her loyalty to him by the second game to the point where she comes back to the US (from training in Asia) to try to help him on his quest for vengeance.

From that much, it seems that she's perhaps the type to discern someone's character from battle - one would at least need to be able to keep up with her in battle to earn her trust. However, having her ass utterly handed to her by a psychopathic alien in No More Heroes 3 proves that being bested in combat is not the only factor in her loyalty. Travis had spared her life, back in No More Heroes 1, even when it was considered downright disrespectful to do so. While that much initially seemed to piss Shinobu off, perhaps it was because of that mercy in that not only did she feel indebted to him for sparing her life, but also figured that someone like that couldn't have possibly killed her father in the first place. So, at the very least, one would also have to have some noble aspect to their character to gain her loyalty

Even when she might have reason to pledge her allegiance to someone else, after Travis rejects her romantic advances in No More Heroes 2 in a pretty embarrassing situation for herself, it still doesn't seem to have an effect on her loyalty, as she's still steadfast in her allegiance to him in both Travis Strikes Again and No More Heroes 3, though she has since moved on from her romantic feelings and continues on a more platonic student/teacher sort of connection with him.

Through her loyalty to Travis, not only did she have her heart broken, but she also left the children she had been helping in Travis' absence to help him, and then had both of her arms torn off in battle in trying to save him from an alien, but even while in a coma, she still uttered her loyalty to him. So really, if you can gain this girl's loyalty, she will NEVER falter from it.

Your Faction leader, not just your boss but the leader, has asked you to carry out a hit. The target is a non-affiliated public leader, well-liked by the people of the city. Do you carry it out? Why or why not?

Even if Shinobu is an assassin, a situation like that would be complicated for her, particularly because she seemed to gain some more morals as she grew older. While she likely would have carried the hit with no questions asked in the first or second No More Heroes game, she states in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes in that she still carries out hits because there's "too many terrible people in this world" (and she's able to provide for her students from the blood money).

In a case where she's asked to kill someone that seems beloved by the public, Shinobu would at least want to know why her faction leader wants them dead. She's aware that being publicly adored doesn't necessarily mean that the person in question is a good person themselves (and could just be putting on a face for the public), so if the faction leader had some reasoning in that the person themselves was a terrible person, Shinobu would carry out the hit with no further questions, particularly if they respected the faction leader in addition to it.

However, if the reasoning was something akin to "I DUNNO I JUST DON'T LIKE THEM", Shinobu would be more prone to refuse the hit and suffer the consequences from it. Maybe if she pledged her loyalty to the faction leader, or consequences were threatened to someone other than herself, she might begrudgingly accept the hit, but she wouldn't feel particularly good about it if she couldn't at least let the other person give her a good fight out of it. To be honest, even if she's guilted into taking the hit, she might give the target in question the chance for a fight anyway just to ease her growing conscious a little bit.

You've worked with your Faction awhile now and you feel like the reward of your contract is within reach. But at the last moment, you are told you have even more service to pay beforehand, an obscure clause in the contract being exploited to keep you under your boss's thumb even longer. Your Faction Leader hasn't spoken on this, and might be able to dispute it. Do you go to your leader? Do you argue the dispute yourself? Do you begrudgingly accept the additional work? Something else?

As shown in No More Heroes 2, Shinobu can follow a superior's orders, even if she really doesn't seem to like them at all. However, even if she can be a model employee in a black market business, the game also showed that she is very adamant and vocal in getting what she is promised. While the second game is never actually clear in what she was actually promised, Shinobu has absolutely no problem in dissecting Sylvia's entire personality in front of her in negotiating for Shinobu's assistance and Shinobu even threatens that if she's to double-cross her, she's dead. However, once Sylvia laughs it off and states that Shinobu can't kill her, Shinobu just looks annoyed and mutters that she wasn't even worth the stain on her blade anyway.

So thus, while Shinobu would definitely march up to the faction leader herself with zero fucks given and demand to know what the deal is (with a whole lot of shit talk in the midst of it, to boot) and dispute it as much as she's able to, Shinobu is unlikely to take any further action than that. While she is still utterly unafraid to speak her mind in the later games, she's also not stupid - Shinobu is very good at objectively comparing her own power level to any potential opponents and would hold back on any potential rebellion if she knew she couldn't win.

Regardless, while she would begrudgingly continue to work under the revised contract, she may be susceptible to changing alliances to teaming up with a group of people if she thinks that the benefits would outweigh the consequences. Also, if she had no loyal ties to anyone in the faction, of course - in which case, she will 100% just suffer the further stipulations to her contract through sheer loyalty, even if it's just one person in the entire faction.

How do you define "failure"? How do you deal with the consequences of failure, from light to severe?

While Shinobu is someone who is extremely boastful and confident, throughout the entire canon of No More Heroes, she has shown that experiencing failure in any degree is something that affects her greatly and not just something she can easily brush off. Even in a necessary minor failure in which she had to rip her own prosthetic arm off to escape a hold in her fight with Destroyman, Shinobu is still pretty upset after winning the fight and muttering about having to take her arm off and that she fell for the tactic in which she was put into the hold in the first place.

As someone who puts a lot of emphasis on her own fighting skill (as she's at least the third generation of fighters/assassins), it's not enough to just win a fight, she has to dominate her opponent to be completely satisfied in a fight. She's so downright obsessed in constantly improving her fighting technique, she even mentions in No More Heroes 3 that her favorite movies are ones in which she can study the swordplay of - she can't even enjoy a movie if she doesn't have something to learn from it.

Of course, in cases where Shinobu loses completely, it's something that hits her even harder. When losing in the first game, she not only pledges her loyalty to Travis, but also leaves the country for three years without telling a single person (until being called back by Sylvia to help Travis out, otherwise she likely would have stayed even longer) to both improve her fighting technique and to tone down her cockiness that was a major factor in why she lost the battle in the first place.

Even when she was defeated to the point of a coma in No More Heroes 3, Shinobu never rests easy even in her unconscious state and talks in her sleep about how she still wanted to go out and fight and that she can still help her Master in taking down enemies. Though there's no fucking way to know how it could have happened in a logical sense (that's this canon for you!!!!), Shinobu still somehow finds a way to continue training in her coma and comes out with an entirely new fighting style.

Basically, if Shinobu ever experiences failure, she's stupidly intense about it, when she's already studious about minimizing failures at all costs.

POWERS & ABILITIES:

KATANA SKILLS
-Gentōken -- Shinobu can charge up her sword to unleash a blast of energy that can attack enemies from long distances. As this is the only part of her skill set that has any sort of supernatural nature to it, I'm willing to nerf this down to just a visual effect to start with, in the game. Over time, she can then build the more destructive nature of it up to (and perhaps beyond) its canon effectiveness.
-Apparently has enough strength to decapitate enemies. In NMH3, she's shown the capability to cleanly split an alien's head into two down to his shoulders using just a seemingly normal katana.
-Somehow, she's also capable of blocking gunfire with her blade.
-Was the daughter of someone considered a master swordsman, and her grandfather was a co-instructor in some form of assassination, so it's probably safe to assume that she's extremely competent in the art of the blade, in general. To support this, even with two artificial arms, she seemingly has no setbacks in using her katana. Even when in cases where she rips one of the arms off herself (it was to escape a hold, okay), she still has no issues in wielding a blade in even her seemingly less dominant hand.

AGILITY
-Can jump very high and flip over a person’s head in spite of not being any more than five feet flat herself (not including high heels)
-Seems to be very good at parkour, able to kick herself off of a building while in air gracefully.
-Shinobu can also do a diving attack with her katana.
-She's really fast, seemingly capable of flash stepping during combat.
-Has a tendency to appear out of fucking nowhere from very high locations and flipping the entire way down. I promise you I'm not over-exaggerating here, this canon is just Like That.
-She can somehow lodge her sword into a person and spin on the handle to drill it in more. I don't even know, it makes no goddamned sense. The point is, she's stupidly good with the agility thing.

BIONIC ARMS
-It's not clearly explained what exactly it's capable of, in canon, but she ripped a guy's robotic appendage off with ease, seemingly using no effort at all using just her arm. So it's likely that there's at least some enhanced strength in both of her robotic prosthetics.
-But they can also be ripped off fairly easily if someone also has some sort of enhanced strength.
-In addition to this, they seem to have the ability to negate electricity -- Destroyman attempted to shock her through a handshake, but it didn't seem to have any effect on her. It probably only pertains to her robotic arms, however. "Was this supposed to 'spark'? Lame."

OTHER
- She can fight in high heels. She's so short that she wears that shit in BATTLE.
- Can speak both English and Japanese.
- Is knowledgeable enough in martial arts and bushido to the extent of being able to teach it to children.
-Apparently learned wrestling moves from legends such as Jimmy Snuka, Ricky Steamboat, and Karl Gotch while in a coma. The game specifically mentions her learning the Burning Hammer, so imagine this short ass woman doing that.

SUITABILITY:
Shinobu comes from a canon where she herself fought in an association that held battles between ranked assassins in matches to the death. She's been an assassin for at least 12 years (from the age of 18, if not even before then) and as of the events of Travis Strikes Back, Shinobu is still carrying out hits to fund the children from a less fortunate neighborhood. Even in No More Heroes 3, she's still murdering aliens without giving a single fuck in the world, so she'll do just fine here.

FACTION SUITABILITY:

The Shuten Clan
Shinobu seems to be those asshole types to discern a person through battle (as her opinion on Travis completely flipped from hated enemy to UNDYING LOYALTY from just before fighting him to after being defeated), and straight up states "strategy is born from battle" in NMH3, so she'd fit right into the whole thing about strength and will determining one's destiny. Even if her job title is "assassin", she is more akin to a traditional fighter (even fighting in areas very much like an arena) in that her greatest internal desire seems to be to strengthen her capability in fighting, so that she may someday be able to live up to the legacy of her father and grandfather who were both fighters themselves, so the clan would at least probably try to recruit her. As she's perhaps straightforward to a fault (to the point it has thrown multiple characters off-guard, in canon), Shinobu also holds contempt for liars and would jive well with that aspect of the clan.

Controversely, Shinobu is so studious and maybe even downright masochistic in bettering herself in that she would not meld well with the whole partying aspect. She'll be the wet blanket on a good time, but hey, if you need a sober driver, SHE'S YOUR GIRL.

The Tamamo Clan
Oh boy. Uh. On the upside, Shinobu comes from a pretty storied family herself, so she would never dare to challenge Tenko-hime's claim of ancestry. If there's any establishments in which clients get off on someone being overly straightforward and telling them how stupid and worthless they are, Shinobu is your girl? Could be one hell of a pet project for someone to try to shape Shinobu to the clan's ideals.

However, Shinobu would clash with virtually every value this clan seems to have. Shinobu is not one to strategize and straight up prefers to wing it during battle. As previously mentioned, Shinobu is so honest and stubborn that she would also not be very good for the whole pleasure business. Also, while Shinobu is not oppossed to making people disappear, she also has a thing for maiming people in combat, okay.

The Sutoku Alliance
Though a lot of what Shinobu does in canon as an assassin is more weirdly public fighting with other assassins, she has also carried out more traditional hits in the profession, so she wouldn't be entirely out of place in the more secretive nature of the alliance. As a person who follows the ways of bushido very strictly, she's also very good about never telling any secret ever and would probably also die before doing so. She would probably jive the best with this group of people's lifestyle, if I had to guess?

But also, since Shinobu is one to jump right into battle if given the choice, she could grow bored with the emphasis on information gathering.

The Department of the Enma
In spite of being a career assassin, Shinobu has expressed a desire for a peaceful world before, so somehow being a part of the "cops" wouldn't be the worst fit for her. Even if the department's focus isn't on justice, Shinobu does have a pretty strong sense of it herself, so she's not necessarily anti-authority. But the real bread and butter for her case is that she's definitely been used for underhanded tactics before, and even if she prefers pure combat, Shinobu has used dirty tricks herself if she's backed into a corner, so she'd at least work for that aspect of the faction.

On the other hand, Shinobu has prided herself in feeling more "herself" in living in the more slum-like parts of the world and might not deal well with the constraints of the department. Also, she doesn't seem to value order more than she does her loyalty to those who have gained her trust.

SAMPLES

Here is where you link RP samples! While we'll accept any format of thread for these, we'd like to have two (or more) different ones to go through, with at least five or more comments from your character present. Samples that are set within the game environment, such as those done on the TDM, are preferred but not strictly required.